FriendOfDeSoto

@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you think a socialist President would win the 2028 election? Would they use the exact methods used by Zohran Mamdani which earned him the office of Mayor of NYC?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I chose him because he is generally well liked. I haven’t heard anybody shit talk him. I don’t see him as a person of inaction or unaccountability. I do see him as somebody who acts from a set of values and who can heal wounds thoughtfully (without letting perpetrators go unpunished). Go ahead and replace him in your mind with somebody who fits that profile.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you think a socialist President would win the 2028 election? Would they use the exact methods used by Zohran Mamdani which earned him the office of Mayor of NYC?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with American politics is that it affects the whole world but the rest of the world doesn’t get a say. If you organize armed resistance against 47, that becomes very active when he declares himself king with no more elections, you are looking at a civil war 2.0. The right-wing supporters are already armed and organized, you’d give them something to shoot at. And the standing military will probably majority side more with the other side. At the same time, while the US is distracted by killing each other at a higher rate than usual, China will grab Taiwan, Russia will push through to the Elbe river, etc. So it would be better for the rest of the world if you could not solve this predicament by force/assassination. Protest, strikes, use politics. But I can totally understand why the sentiment to use the 2nd amendment for its stated purpose for a change is an appealing option.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you think a socialist President would win the 2028 election? Would they use the exact methods used by Zohran Mamdani which earned him the office of Mayor of NYC?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A socialist will not win 2028, provided there even is an election. NYC is not representative of the whole country. And most Americans are still on this cold war hangover where socialism became a dirty word. An outspoken socialist would not win. Unless we get another great depression - which will if history is our guide more likely lead to war. Or if they manage to fake centrism so believably well and are then okay to be a one-termer once they show their real colors. The Democrats need a Mr. Rogers type politician (preferably male, blame the Midwest) without scandals (so nobody from CA) who can appeal to a sense of decency again. #MADA

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The singular they is actually such a natural part of the English language, the people complaining about it almost certainly use it without noticing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think this would’ve happened though if there hadn’t been the societal impetus that aided adoption. The singular they may have been around since Chaucer or Shakespeare - ~30 years ago, people didn’t really use it. There was far more “he or she” going on, that’s now been more commonly replaced with a “they,” also because it’s shorter. English benefits from the fact that the neutral pronoun slots right in to the existing grammar. Other languages struggle with finding such a neutral replacement because it’s more often than not a new word and a slightly altered grammatical function. English is okay on the first problem and arguably okay to mostly okay on the second.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Laaaast Christmas …

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK this is Edward Bullmore, one of the world leading expert on the human brain. He believes a lot of depression is linked to inflammation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  So this scientist believes this? Huh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Winnie the Pooh considered "racist" now or are .ml folks using it as an excuse to defend Xi Jin Ping?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re right, it could’ve been a case of preemptive obedience by the censors, based on popularity and face-losing potential of the meme. I vaguely remember reading about him not being pleased. But it’s also been a decade.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If the protests in Iran win/topple the government what will it look like immediately afterwards? Also what would be the good or bad about installing a monarchy again?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The economy is shit. No matter who will be in charge, they will fight an uphill battle.

  There is one example in recent history where the reinstallation of the monarchy went great (=as well as it could): Spain. The monarch let the country slide from a dictatorship into a constitutional monarchy. One that decided to pull the veil of silence over the crimes of the old regime but still a democracy. So let’s hope the possible return of the Shah follows the Spanish example more than anything else.

  I don’t think anyone can predict what will happen in Iran. My gut feeling is that a collapse of the current regime will lead to a fracturing of the country, something like a civil war between moderates and religious fundamentalists. A mix of what happened in Libya post Gaddafi, Iraq post regime change, and Syria post Assad. The overthrow of the mullahs will only be the first step.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Without getting into current politics can someone describe to me what an authoritarian regime looks like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Source: I’ve lived there for a decade, talked with people, including PSB officers.

  Every time China is in trouble, mostly economically, they play up the Japan stuff. There are island disputes, there is historical baggage. They play it like a piano and those are pretty much the only times organized street protests are permitted.

  I disagree with you about what you think is irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Winnie the Pooh considered "racist" now or are .ml folks using it as an excuse to defend Xi Jin Ping?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I’m concerned it was never racist. It was Chinese internet users looking at a picture of Xi and Obama at a summit and compared them in stature, aptly I might add, to Winnie and Tigger. It never stuck with Obama and Xi evidently took it with no sense of humor.

  Outside of China the majority of people will not be aware of this meme or have forgotten all about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Without getting into current politics can someone describe to me what an authoritarian regime looks like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  China? The country of Tiananmen Square? The country whose people practically develop an ever-changing coded language to avoid big brother coming down hard on any sort of criticism? The country that runs “reeducation” camps for many who do get caught? The country that has Uyghurs and Tibetans to blame “within,” and Japan without? Or the US? Where senior cadres of the party magically grow richer?

  Don’t pin authoritarianism on lack of administrative competence.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Without getting into current politics can someone describe to me what an authoritarian regime looks like?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t get to vote or if you do it doesn’t matter. There is little to no separation between the three pillars executive, legislative, and judicature. So there is little to no oversight, which leads to a breakdown of the rule of law. People can and will be disappeared. People live in fear and try to adapt, self-censor. Authoritarian leaders need a bogie man, somebody they can blame for all their failures. So an ethnic group, minority, or another country will constantly be blamed for everything from the economy to ingrown toe nails. The elite will get richer, everybody else pretty much won’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there desire for Capt. Una spin-off?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was under the impression that they do exactly the opposite of what fans want. So, Paramount, if you’re listening, we want a TOS reboot, more Section 31, and everything as movies, please. Under no circumstances do we want an episodic Captain Una show! Please do a prequel to Enterprise instead, but with Borgs. And I mean the ones from Picard S2, of course.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hotel review sites should include a section where reviewers can share the internet speed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I get that. But a rating system by the unwashed masses is going to give you shit data to base your decision on. Because they cannot tell if it was a setting on their device, the hotel network, their ISP, or an act of god that fucked up their internet speed. People are dumb, attribute fault preferably externally. They’ll all blame it on the hotel. You could be reading five reviews from last week about bad internet when there was an unfortunate power outage at the big brand ISP and they were running on the backup satellite internet the hotel had ready for just that case. That doesn’t tell you shit about what it’s like on any other day when everything is working fine. And the reviews end up hurting their business.

  Ratings work if you get thousands of them to get enough variety, which I think you probably won’t here. Or if you find a trusted source, a reviewer who knows what they’re doing. Internet speed is in the reviewer category for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hotel review sites should include a section where reviewers can share the internet speed⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem with speed as a metric is that it isn’t just up to the hotel infrastructure if you as a user actually get it. You’d be rating the hotel on the performance of their ISP and other factors not under their control. Let’s say you traveled from far and try to access websites from home, and the undersea cable got disconnected by mad shark, it’s not the hotel’s fault but you cannot expect that all users will consider that it isn’t the hotel’s fault when they give it a one-star rating on internet speed. If you’re behind the great firewall of China anything but local sites are fast.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨can't change password for lemmy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You go to this website, choose the theme, then look for the floating bar at the bottom, hit the hamburger menu icon (three lines), choose log in > forgot password

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m neither in the US nor a US citizen and this requires boots on the ground. But if you want some ideas: organize protest marches, many and often, a general strike would be good, bombard relentlessly elected officials with phone calls and emails, campaign for impeachments especially after the midterms, get people to vote in the midterms for anything that weakens the incumbents’ power. Call out the media that downplays the international rights violations in this Venezuela shitshow. Nationalists go gungho over this stuff, patriots are brave enough to call out mistakes. Protest the Orwellian press accreditation rules at minipax. Start a campaign with empathy at its core, empathy towards the economically sidelined and destitute, the migrants who keep your economy afloat, the people who die senseless deaths (due to gun violence, just as one example). Cost of living, health insurance, social security to tackle homelessness in particular. Lack of empathy is what’s driving this neo-fascist bus and I believe you can be better than that as a people. It’d be great if it didn’t just end up as a hashtag. It may be time to start a new political movement that refuses to follow in bipartisan trodden paths. Start investing the time you do something like doomscrolling now. Get off the free platforms whose billionaire owners sat at 47’s table, checkbook in hand, for anything other than organizing protests.

  My contribution will be to reduce the amount of money I end up giving to American companies, not plan any trips to the US (probably ever again considering the ridiculous list of information I need to provide to get my visa waiver), and to lobby my government to reduce their reliance on the US. The mealymouthed reactions to the US breach of international law among its allies and the velvet gloved treatment we give the orange toddler are my concern. Fixing the US is for the Americans. If you have ideas on how to support you from the sidelines, pipe up. We’ll all have you live in this neo-fascist, neo-imperial hellhole.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I understand that shit is hard. My projection for the future is just: it isn’t getting better. Much the opposite. So what are you surviving for? To watch your country spiral down the toilet? To be branded a playground bully and unreliable partner internationally? Economies don’t thrive on that, either. And economists are dot com bust Lehman crash level concerned about the single minded bet on so-called AI that represents pretty much the only GDP growth today.

  Meanwhile the great dealmaker hasn’t brought down cost of living because he thinks the word tariff is beautiful. He didn’t want another war, was so thirsty for the peace prize, and yet ordered the illegal invasion into Venezuela and the abduction of its leader on trumped up charges. Late night show hosts are your free speech canaries in the coalmine. Oh, and he’s a convicted SA felon and very much connected to that late pedophile who shall remain nameless here.

  If you don’t find a way to resist and oppose now, I think you will be sleepwalking into an even worse future. This will have been the good ol days.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The country with the biggest military force on this planet can do many things. But it shouldn’t. Ability and legal justification are two different things. It isn’t done doesn’t mean they’re not capable. Abu Ghraib happened and shouldn’t have either.

  It’s not a perfect comparison but you could take your kitchen knife and stab a rando on the street. You can do that but you shouldn’t. Because we have rules. And we have rules because without them soon everybody be stabbing everybody else. And if you stabbed a rando on the street in Caracas you don’t exactly have the moral high ground when you want you tell your pals Vlad or Jinping not to stab randos in Kyiv or Taipei.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If president abductions are something that can apparently just happen how come Putin or Kim Jong Un aren't in some foreign prison right now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because you cannot just go into a country and kidnap the leader. With no declaration of war, no jurisdiction at all, not even a hint of a justification through the UN. That’s why it isn’t done. Americans ought to be on the streets protesting in force. Their children at the latest will rue this day. 47 just sealed the end of the rules-based international order. He didn’t start that fire but he dropped 50 gazillion barrels of Venezuelan crude onto it. This is not good bad very, very bad.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Who decided that it wouldn’t make sense?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I look forward to renaming virtually everything in the Americas.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You are assuming that the name as it is in Italian today has always been the same and it isn’t. Both Milano and Mailand are linguistic descendants of the name whichever people who first set up shop there spoke and decided to call the place. And that wasn’t anywhere close to modern Italian. They are both valid.

  English ditches the o and has Florence on the books as well. Geographical names follow no logical rule. Most are just historical accidents, some historical crimes. This is more in the former category if you ask me.

  Cologne, Munich, Brussels, Naples, The Hague … It’s everywhere.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  But Germans are not much better, it’s absurd that Italian city names that aren’t at all hard to pronounce for Germans have different names in German, e.g. Torino, Milano, Roma (Turin, Mailand, Rom), …

  Nobody is better. All languages do this to an extent. The Germanized city names especially in Northern Italy also stem from the fact that they used to be under Austrian control and they claim to speak German too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why in hospitals, is 'gun shot wound' appreciated as "GSW"-⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Then you’d think wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s at best a piece of circumstantial evidence but not enough to diagnose homophobia. People are weird. People say the wrong thing because they are overthinking it. There could be any number of reasons why they reacted the way they reacted and only one of them is homophobia. More data is needed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can other countries impose sanctions on the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree with those ideas. Corey has been beating this drum for a while. I’m just afraid this is putting the cart before the horse. Europe and in particular the governments need to get off of the US clouds or they will quickly find themselves up shit cloud (creek) without a parachute (paddle). And I fear building up viable domestic competition will be harder if you reshape the market that drastically next week. But I’m onboard with it in general.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should the next President of the United States do?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Constitutions are just documents. The US one isn’t bad, save for a few amendments. A constitution only works well if the people in the three branches act within the spirit of it. Once you get people in who DGAF you see all the breaking points in the system that are normally papered over by decorum and moral standards. And those are things you cannot necessarily write into laws. The exception to that is the way political parties and campaigns are funded; that’s definitely something that should be addressed.

  It doesn’t really matter who will be the next US president. They won’t be the leader of the free world any more. They will be increasingly isolated on the world stage and dealing with a domestic landscape somewhere between unbelievably fractured and civil war.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can other countries impose sanctions on the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  At UN level, it will be pretty much impossible to sanction the US. They’ll just veto everything away. Either by procedure or behind the scenes diplomacy.

  It is also debatable if UN level sanctions are that effective in 2026. North Korea kept finding creative ways to get around them.

  And these days, WGAF about international law anyways? International law, shminternational law. Sorry, I’m busy. I’m off to abduct another dictator on trumped up charges and then run his country.

  The EU resorted to counter-tariff the US where it hurts the financial contributors to 47 and his bootlickers the most. Harleys, jeans, and whisky were the first package, I think. I believe this is the only viable way to exert pressure. In 2026 that means playing hardball around the hardware for all this so-called AI stuff, somehow weening people off of US controled internet services, and not buying weapons from the US - just a few examples.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is "depress" ever used in this context?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve recently read it on a hotel key card in the instructions: insert key card and depress lever.